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Program Improves Heart Patients' Care

Posted on: Friday, 18 November 2005, 18:00 CST

FRIDAY, Nov. 18 (HealthDay News) -- The Get With The Guidelines -- Coronary Artery Disease program, meant to improve doctors' adherence to heart disease treatment standards, significantly improved hospital care of coronary artery patients over a year, according to a new report.

"Men and women, young and old, all showed dramatic improvements in care," study lead author Dr. Gray Ellrodt, chair of the department of medicine at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Mass., said in a prepared statement.

The findings were presented at this week's annual meeting of the American Heart Association, in Dallas.

The program is a Web-based continuous quality-improvement tool, the researchers explained. It provides health professionals with instant access to the latest data to guide treatment decisions while also providing patients with American Heart Association (AHA) information about coronary-artery disease.

The program also sends quarterly reports to hospitals and care teams to let them know how well they're meeting key treatment goals set by the AHA and the American College of Cardiology (ACC).

This study of nearly 30,000 patients at 198 U.S. hospitals found that at the start of the study adherence to AHA/ACC treatment guidelines ranged from 75.5 percent among women over age 75 to close to 80 percent for men under age 65.

However, after a year of the program, treatment guideline adherence grew to:

87.6 percent for men and 84.1 percent for women under age 65,

86.5 percent for men and 83 percent for women ages 65-74,

84.9 percent for men and 82.8 percent for women 75 and older.

The greatest increases in adherence to treatment standards were among male patients over age 75 (8.8 percent) and females under age 65 (8 percent). The lowest increases were among women ages 65 to 74 (7 percent) and women 75 and older (7.3 percent).

"Why does this gap persist even though we improved care for everybody? We're going to look at a larger database and look at performance at medical centers for two years to see if we can erase or eliminate the differences," Ellrodt said. "Ideally, it should have been 100 percent for everybody. We want to improve care for everyone and eliminate the differences related to gender and age."

More information

Here's where you can learn more about Get With The Guidelines.

SOURCE: American Heart Association, news release, Nov. 14, 2005~HATT~~HOSP~~DOCS~~HRTD~~HRTM~

Source: HealthSCOUT

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